Newer "weird" experimental music - any suggestions?

[Sunshine_and_Smiles]

Fuck Buttons may be right up your alley. Tarot Sport, their second album, was released in 2009 and I prefer it to the debut. Lots of feedback, lots of dissonance, electronics.

HEALTH is a more standard band (by which I mean drums, guitars, length of songs) but their sound is pretty abrasive, pretty powerful, and pretty different. Check out the video for We Are Water (youtube link, but still kinda NSFW), which was discussed around the Dope a couple times.

I’ll throw Salem in because 1.) they’re dark and weird, 2.) I really like them, and 3.) I already gave you two decent recs. These guys (and a girl) may have more in common with Lady Gaga (or Britney Spears - here’s their “cover” of 'Til the World Ends - again, it’s not overtly obscene but still somewhat NSFW) than I’d like to admit, but I also don’t think anyone is making music quite like them. Here’s a fan video for my favorite song by them, King Night (you know what? Don’t watch this at work either. NSFW)

Hope you like at least something here. The band names link to their respective AllMusic entries so you can read more about them and view the various discographies for yourself.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

Puff Tube is/was a cool band that released some 7" records back in the day. This site has their stuff available as a free mp3 download. Those tracks have been happily warping my brain for 20 years now.

[VanillaGorilla]

I’ve been kinda busy the last week, so I haven’t gotten around to checking all this stuff out yet, but I will. In the meantime I’d just like to once again say thank you for all suggestions. This is great!

[Steken]

The early industrial scene – Throbbing Gristle, S.P.K., etc. – spawned hundreds of bands in dozens of different sub-genres, all of which are (to me, anyway) interesting. Welcome to the jungle!

Here’s a quick primer, just off the top of my head, organized not after my personal favourites but rather so that you yourself can pick and choose depending on your own personal taste.

If what draws you in is the really harsh, noisy, aggressive part of those early pioneers did, the next step would be stuff like Genocide Organ, Con-Dom and Sutcliffe Jügend. The genre is called “power electronics” and is, well, quite simply the most violent stuff you’ll ever hear. The important countries here are the U.K., Germany and the USA.

If you prefer the atmospheric, meditative, soulful stuff, that lets your mind drift off into all manner of dark, beautiful “soundscapes,” then by all means check out Lustmord, Inade, and about a half a dozen Swedish bands tied to the Cold Meat Industries label. The genre is called “dark ambient.”

Plenty of bands from an industrial background also picked up folk music (sounds counterintuitive, I know) after a while, and came up with their own twist on that. The genre is called “neo-folk”, and the grandmasters are almost exclusively British: Current 93, led by the enigmatic David Tibet, started out as a strictly ritualistic outfit, but soon went into “apocalyptic folk” territory, and a thousand bands followed. Very strange, very psychedelic, very beautiful.

If you want balls-to-the-wall aural insanity, Japan is the place to go. (Who’da thunk it, right?) Bands like Merzbow, Masonna, etc. “Jnoise,” or “japanoise.” Not for the faint at heart!

If you like drones – those heavy bass-y tones that leave your entire ribcage vibrating – then you’ve probably already heard of Sunn O))).

If what you want is simply to shake your ass on the dancefloor like an idiot, then by all means explore the E.B.M. genre.

I could go on and on, but these are the basics. If you can tell me more exactly what it is you like about the early stuff, I can probably point you in the right direction a little bit more precisely.

[Panurge]

Nice post, Steken - a good introduction to some of the grandfathers of modern experimental music. Throbbing Gristle, Current 93, and (especially) Merzbow deserves a mention. If you ever get the chance to hear any of these in concert, go!

I humbly offer Goodiepal - he’s about as radical as you can get in experimental music. There’s a ton of stuff on Youtube (including his lecture “Mort aux vaches extra extra” (in English) about construing a new kind of electronic music. It’s not for everyone, though.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Panurge

I humbly offer Goodiepal - he’s about as radical as you can get in experimental music. There’s a ton of stuff on Youtube (including his lecture “Mort aux vaches extra extra” (in English) about construing a new kind of electronic music. It’s not for everyone, though.

I humbly differ with your assessment.

I first clicked your link and was immediately skeptical about what I’d hear, mostly due to the second sentence in the wiki article:

The eccentric and self-made Goodiepal has influenced the course of modern music through radical excursions into computer technology and media art.

FFS, he’s only 23 or 24 years old. He hasn’t influenced “the course of modern music” any more than anyone else who buys music or plays in a band.

Then I went to youtube and found a bunch of his videos. I listened to prolly 12 or 13 songs and didn’t hear anything more radical than the average tune you can find on my old stomping grounds, acidplanet.com. He’s a talented pianist and KORG Triton (or whatever keyboard he uses) programmer, but so are a zillion other people.

I don’t think his music is particularly experimental. He doesn’t use strange homemade or exotic instruments instruments, no tempo changes, no odd key signatures, no polyrhythms; I’m not sure why this guy even gets the experimental label. Maybe it’s because he dubs in record scratch sounds to his recordings?

To each his own, tho. I mean, Goodiepal’s music doesn’t suck or anything; I’m just not sure why it would be labeled “experimental”.

I’ll offer up some Bruce Haack: War and Electric To Me Turn from 1970’s Electric Lucifer. Bruce was building his own synthesizers, drum machines and theremin-like instruments back in the 1960s.

And I’ll also offer up another favorite composer of mine, Steven Reich. The first song I ever heard by him, Come Out, floored me. I’m still fascinated by the possibilities inherent in sine wave phase shifting, both rhythmically and melodically. For those unfamiliar with this piece:

[

Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. Reich was asked to write this piece to be performed at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem Six, six black youths arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Riot of 1964 for which only one of the six was responsible.

Reich eventually used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the boys involved in the riots but not responsible for the murder; he was nineteen at the time of the recording. At the beginning of the piece, he says: “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them” (alluding to how Hamm had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police that he had been beaten). The police had not previously wanted to treat Hamm’s injuries, since he did not appear seriously wounded.
Reich re-recorded the fragment “come out to show them” on two channels, which initially play in unison. They quickly slip out of sync to produce a phase shifting effect, characteristic of Reich’s early works. Gradually, the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation and, later, almost a canon. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, until the actual words are unintelligible. The listener is left with only the rhythmic and tonal patterns of the spoken words. Reich says in the liner notes to his recording Early Works of using recorded speech as source material that “by not altering its pitch or timbre, one keeps the original emotional power that speech has while intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm”. The piece is a prime example of process music.

](Come Out (Reich) - Wikipedia)

Oh, and one more band (who I’m gonna see for the first time in almost 20 years next month): Butthole Surfers. Three of my favorites are Cherub, Dum Dum and Concubine.

[Panurge]

@Snowboarder_Bo

I humbly differ with your assessment.

I first clicked your link and was immediately skeptical about what I’d hear, mostly due to the second sentence in the wiki article:

FFS, he’s only 23 or 24 years old. He hasn’t influenced “the course of modern music” any more than anyone else who buys music or plays in a band.

Then I went to youtube and found a bunch of his videos. I listened to prolly 12 or 13 songs and didn’t hear anything more radical than the average tune you can find on my old stomping grounds, acidplanet.com. He’s a talented pianist and KORG Triton (or whatever keyboard he uses) programmer, but so are a zillion other people.

I don’t think his music is particularly experimental. He doesn’t use strange homemade or exotic instruments instruments, no tempo changes, no odd key signatures, no polyrhythms; I’m not sure why this guy even gets the experimental label. Maybe it’s because he dubs in record scratch sounds to his recordings?

To each his own, tho. I mean, Goodiepal’s music doesn’t suck or anything; I’m just not sure why it would be labeled “experimental”.

[…]

Heh. Hadn’t actually read the Wiki page - Goodiepal really has some pretty dedicated fans. Oh, and he’s around 35, I think.

He has made numerus strange mechanical and digital instruments himself, lots of tempo changes and weird noise stuff. My dear missus rates him no 2 on the “unlistenable” scale right after Merzbow. He mixes hard noise, folk music instrumentations, spoken word, etc.

He used to be professor of modern compositional music at DIEM (Danish Institute for Electro-acoustic Music), so I suppose you might put him in line with that crowd and call it “avant garde” instead of “experimental” (whatever the difference is).

He has made a lot of stuff that is easier on the ears (i.e. more “traditional” electronic music), but for the past 5-8 years he has been totally out there.

FWIW I find Goodiepal and his work to be highly experimental (albeit perhaps not as influential as the wiki would have it) and I think his work is generally held in high regard internationally.

Try this video of him “composing” and performing music live with the help of a strange game involving planets, a mechanical bird and odd sound effects and tell me that isn’t just a little bit experimental.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Panurge

Heh. Hadn’t actually read the Wiki page - Goodiepal really has some pretty dedicated fans. Oh, and he’s around 35, I think.

Aye, yer right. I confused his date of birth (1977) and his first release (1988).

He has made numerus strange mechanical and digital instruments himself, lots of tempo changes and weird noise stuff. My dear missus rates him no 2 on the “unlistenable” scale right after Merzbow. He mixes hard noise, folk music instrumentations, spoken word, etc.

He used to be professor of modern compositional music at DIEM (Danish Institute for Electro-acoustic Music), so I suppose you might put him in line with that crowd and call it “avant garde” instead of “experimental” (whatever the difference is).

He has made a lot of stuff that is easier on the ears (i.e. more “traditional” electronic music), but for the past 5-8 years he has been totally out there.

FWIW I find Goodiepal and his work to be highly experimental (albeit perhaps not as influential as the wiki would have it) and I think his work is generally held in high regard internationally.

Try this video of him “composing” and performing music live with the help of a strange game involving planets, a mechanical bird and odd sound effects and tell me that isn’t just a little bit experimental.

I saw the bird. It’s definitely infinitely more annoying than a real bird. Apparently he likes whistling tho, as it’s featured prominently in quite a bit of what I heard.

I didn’t bother to go thru my browser history and find everything I listened to, but I did hear My Robotic Skills Have Failed, Totalt Amok Med, The Space Door Is Open, and Under Byen In the Flip Flop Mix among others. Those were all pretty much just regular old trance tunes.

The link you just gave was, I guess, experimental. It’s a guy whistling tunelessly and arrhythmically while occasionally throwing in a grunt. I wasn’t impressed or intrigued. Thanks for the clarification and extra examples tho.

[Profound_Gibberish]

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic

[Panurge]

@Snowboarder_Bo

Aye, yer right. I confused his date of birth (1977) and his first release (1988).

I saw the bird. It’s definitely infinitely more annoying than a real bird. Apparently he likes whistling tho, as it’s featured prominently in quite a bit of what I heard.

I didn’t bother to go thru my browser history and find everything I listened to, but I did hear My Robotic Skills Have Failed, Totalt Amok Med, The Space Door Is Open, and Under Byen In the Flip Flop Mix among others. Those were all pretty much just regular old trance tunes.

The link you just gave was, I guess, experimental. It’s a guy whistling tunelessly and arrhythmically while occasionally throwing in a grunt. I wasn’t impressed or intrigued. Thanks for the clarification and extra examples tho.

That’s the kind of thing he has been doing for the last 5-6 years (but always developing his compositional techniques and instruments). He’s hardly the first musician who has been on either side of the (fictional) Avant Garde Divide.

Experimental doesn’t mean “good” and you definitely don’t need to be impressed. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you. There is no “getting it”, either, IMO. De gustibus etc.

Take Jandek, for instance, who was one of your own examples. I know some of his music, but I don’t consider it particularly impressive. I definitely recognize the weirdness, though. Much of his stuff isn’t really experimental either, but I don’t mind grouping him with the “experimental” (or perhaps “outsider”) crowd.

Some “experimental” music is surprisingly mainstream. Like Walter Carlos’ experiments in developing the synthesizer as a classical instrument. Highly experimental as far as the technical stuff, readily understandable as music.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

A lot of what I’ve listed is older material, and I know the OP was asking after new stuff, so let me introduce a couple of bands/artists who are current to the discussion.

Shining is a deathjazz band from Norway. They combine aspects of jazz and death metal, including awesome sax parts into an aggressive and technically demanding style of music. Here’s The Madness And The Damage Done and live video for Fisheye that shows them performing for Norwegian National Television. Both songs are from their 2010 album Blackjazz, which was excellent. The sax player, Jørgen Munkeby, also contributed to Ihsahn’s last album, 2010’s After. I wrote about this album on my blog.

Other metal bands that might fit the experimental label include some of the math metal bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan (Panasonic Youth, Sick On Sunday), and Meshuggah (Pineal Gland Optics, Pravus) as well as some of the deathcore bands like Suicide Silence (Suffer, Unanswered) and Trigger The Bloodshed (The Scourging Impurity, The Soulful Dead). These bands take a noticeable lack of respect for traditional song structure and voicings and basically go nuts with the freedom they find having shed those shackles. Their music is abrasive, raw and caustic. Sometimes it’s so jarring that it feels like being slapped upside the head hard enough to rattle some fillings loose; live shows are an epic experience.

Other bands that kind of defy easy characterization but are way cool include Arsonists Get All The Girls (The 42nd Ego, Shoeshine For Neptune), and the awesome Iwresteldabearonce (Tastes Like Kevin Bacon, See You In Shell, Danger In The Manger). For bands like these, it’s not just the music that’s jarring, it’s the way they change from one genre to another mid-measure. One second it’s all death metal, suddenly it’s smooth jazz, then it’s grindcore blast beats. Vocals go from CMVs to pop chanteuse and back again. For many people it’s too confusing, too harsh and undanceable; for others it’s a beautiful example of jaw-dropping complexity with sterling execution.

Yeah, my version of “experimental” is heavy on the metal side; it’s what I listen to.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@dbx820

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic

Great Band! Roger Miller rocks! I just made a video for Boil Away just for this thread. This is from his 1987 album The Big Industry, where he played his Maximum Electric Piano (think “prepared piano” a la John Cage). It’s a great album and was a fantastic live show.

BTW, I wrote to Mr. Miller asking permission for the video and for a couple more. If he’s okay with it, I’m going to use them for a piece on my blog about this album!

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Panurge

That’s the kind of thing he has been doing for the last 5-6 years (but always developing his compositional techniques and instruments). He’s hardly the first musician who has been on either side of the (fictional) Avant Garde Divide.

Experimental doesn’t mean “good” and you definitely don’t need to be impressed. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you. There is no “getting it”, either, IMO. De gustibus etc.

LOL no experimental definitely doesn’t mean “good”. Lots of experimental music is shite.

@Panurge

Take Jandek, for instance, who was one of your own examples. I know some of his music, but I don’t consider it particularly impressive. I definitely recognize the weirdness, though. Much of his stuff isn’t really experimental either, but I don’t mind grouping him with the “experimental” (or perhaps “outsider”) crowd.

Jandek is definitely “outsider”; he’s about as outside as you can get. I think he’s experimental because he’s eschewed such norms as song structure, tuning, technical ability, coherence, rhythm, and melody. And yet what he does is undeniably music.

@Panurge

Some “experimental” music is surprisingly mainstream. Like Walter Carlos’ experiments in developing the synthesizer as a classical instrument. Highly experimental as far as the technical stuff, readily understandable as music.

Yep, I can get behind that sentiment. The original Switched-On Bach remains one of my favorite albums, and without it we might not have seen the likes of Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, or The Art of Noise.

[Panurge]

Arrr. We agree, then…

Love Meshuggah by the way - haven’t heard them in ages, but they play some seriously mean rhythms.

Not that weird, but I really like Tys Tys (Danish for “hush, hush”): Supermarket and Busses (the video for the last one was made by a good friend of mine).

[HoboStew]

@Sunshine_and_Smiles

Fuck Buttons may be right up your alley. Tarot Sport, their second album, was released in 2009 and I prefer it to the debut. Lots of feedback, lots of dissonance, electronics.

Seconded. Tarot Sport is one of the best electronic albums I’ve ever heard. Check out Olympians to get started.

As mentioned above, Animal Collective is great, and I never miss a chance to mention my current mancrush Dan Deacon.

Since you love Neubauten, I recommend the Ata Tak box set which is pretty out there (and I think even has a Neubauten track or two on it).